Jan 18

Jan 18 Interior Chinatown

Author: Charles Yu
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy — the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that's what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more.

Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes, Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterly novel yet.

TL;DR Review

Interior Chinatown is a creative, funny, moving, uniquely told story about race, immigration, and the roles that are cast for us — by others and ourselves.

For you if: You want a big-hearted but hard-hitting book in a fun format.

Full Review

“I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins. And letting that define how I see other people. I’m as guilty of it as anyone.”

This book. Holy moly was it good! I can absolutely see why it won the National Book Award last year — it’s super creative, it’s warm and quite funny, it’s smart and hard-hitting and emotional too. It’s rare that a book comes around that makes you think wow, that was really brilliant and truly unique — but this one does it.

This is a satirical novel about a man named Willis Wu, who’s working his way up the ranks of Generic Asian Men on a cop drama called Black and White. His ultimate dream — the dream of everyone he knows — is to become Kung Fu Guy. (His father was Kung Fu Guy once, but now he’s just Old Asian Man.) In his quest to climb ever higher up a ladder with no top, he’s forced to confront the fact that the roles he plays are cast just as much by himself as by society itself.

First of all, you absolutely have to listen to the audiobook of this one as you read along. It was extremely well voiced and produced, and it added a TON to my reading experience. Truly, don’t miss it. Hats off to Joel de la Fuente for his performance.

This book is so fun to read, and you definitely just have to go with it. Parts are written like a film script, parts in prose. It blends “reality” and metaphor, switching between them to create something that’s not quite linear or logical but super moving and effective. And it’s funny! And the ending — a dream-state court scene — is one of the best I’ve read in a really, really long time.

At its heart, this is a book about race and immigration, the futility of comparing one group’s experience with racism to another’s, holding onto your heritage while breaking out of stereotypes, family, love, identity, confidence, history, and so much more. It’s also a relatively short book you can read in a few hours. Which you absolutely should do.

“There once was a little girl who was —
You pause. Unsure of what to say next.
This is a key point in the story.
The next word, and whatever you say after that, will determine a great many things about it, will either open up the story, like a key in a lock in a door to a palace with however many rooms, too many to count, and hallways and stairways and false walls and secret passages, or the next word could be a wall itself, two walls, closing in, it could be the limits on where the story could go.”